Screenwriter | Essayist | BAFTA LA Newcomer

Bookses of the Year: 2016

The past year has been the annual equivalent of waking up from a nightmare to a hangover, only to find there’s a citywide shortage of kebabs. (As a newish resident of the US, the latter is — I assure you — a very real problem.) My reading has, then, been rather bleaker and more American this year.

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Rightis a superb study of the corrosive impact of covert finance in US politics. A New Yorker staff writer and investigative journalist, Mayer offers crucial context to the hyper-partisan extremism of contemporary American democracy. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Selloutis a brilliant, pungent satire on race relations. At once hilarious and shocking, the book exemplifies the vitality of satire in a fraught political era. US Army veteran Matt Gallagher’s novel Youngblood is a nuanced depiction of a millennial officer’s experience of combat in the Iraq war. An important historical comment, Youngblood is also a potent literary debut. Finally, Ian McGuire’s whaling novel The North Water, is a tactile evocation of a violent, long-dead era that stares deep into the eyes of evil — something we’re getting used to in the US.

I’ve been in the United States this year, so my reading has a distinctly American ‘flavor’. Assuming the country still exists by the time this goes to print (I write on election eve), here are my picks.

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 3, 1926-1929(Cambridge University Press) is a superb contribution to a first-rate series, showing Hemingway up close as he becomes a major writer. It was a treat to have our greatest television critic, Clive James, return to his beat with the excellent and enjoyable Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (Yale University Press). Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right(Scribe) is surely one of the most important political books of the decade, vital for understanding America’s hyper-partisan politics. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – the first American Booker-winner – is currently whizbanging about my head: a stunning satire that leaves no third-rail untouched.